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  • PeachNCream - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    "The main barrier to 2.5 GbE and 5.0 GbE adoption has ultimately been the lack of consumer grade multi-port switches."

    Maybe, but there is also cost, the lack of widespread need, lack of awareness, dominance of wireless networking for endpoints in consumer computing (along with an ever growing absence of wired ethernet hardware in said computers), and the growth of mobile technologies that are displacing existing computing models that have the physical space to support wired network connectivity. I hate to say it, but with Intel being so low-key this might just be an also-ran product intended to check off a feature box so that competitors don't get too far ahead in what is rapidly turning into the networking equivalent of modern retail shopping centers.
  • James5mith - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Are you talking about laptops exclusively? I can't think of a single desktop system, even a NUC that doesn't come with an ethernet port.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Yes, I am. The desktop market is rather small these days and looks like the first victim of mobile computing already with noteworthy exceptions in the small form factor and gaming segments (with the gaming desktop segment declining rapidly in quantity as prices rise on premium parts intended to offset volume loss). That market segment is a dead man walking.
  • close - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Most people (consumers) want to have a simple setup. And since they already own probably 5-6+ WiFi devices (phones, tablets, laptops, watches, etc.) they start to care less about wired because WiFi covers all the needs. You get to see wired for the occasional workstation or NAS, for things that simply don't have other options, or just things that sit next to your router anyway. Not too many scenarios actually require the speed (even real 1Gbps, let alone 2.5Gbps).

    Relatively few people have switches of any kind in the house, short of the one built into the router. So unless manufacturers push 2.5G with regular routers that any regular user would buy, 2.5G switches will pretty much stay a specialty item and expensive for a long while.
  • Makaveli - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Agreed with your post for most consumers how are novice users.

    Anyone that cares about performance will not deal with wireless:
    Jitter
    Interference
    less stable connection than wired

    I only use Wifi for my cell phones and the laptop from time to time.

    Most of my work is done on a Wired desktop pc I have 1Gbps Fiber internet I'm not waiting my time with WiFi.
  • close - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Sure but since we're having the conversation here we can assume we're both "techies". Living in a bubble so to speak. The vast majority of people out there are not. Very few people realistically need to transfer data that fast inside their network and even fewer have a fast enough internet connection to care. So most people don't need to often transfer huge amounts of data fast but they do care about comfort and convenience (no wires) and they *need* WiFi anyway for devices like smartphones.

    I'm not saying I wouldn't like cheaper, faster networking equipment but from a business perspective it makes sense. You can't make this cheap if only a fraction of a percent care about it in the first place.
  • Makaveli - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Nothing to disagree with there sir you are correct.
  • BurntMyBacon - Monday, October 7, 2019 - link

    I agree, but I find it interesting how some of these >1Gbps wireless routers are still connected with 1Gbps hard lines. I suppose that theoretically works for the wireless to wireless transfer scenarios, but I find that use case extremely uncommon in a standard user's setup. The most common transfer is wireless to internet, but there is also the wireless to NAS (or hard lined desktop) scenario. Given that neither of these endpoints can "keep up" with the new wireless standard on a standard 1Gbps connection, it makes little sense for the common user to upgrade their wireless router until at least some of the standard ports are also upgraded. Once the internet interface is upgraded we'll have some headroom to get multigig internet, but that is another story. I suspect multigig will come to consumer grade routers if for no other reason than to facilitate the ever increasing wireless standard speeds. That is unless they start connecting to the internet service provider wirelessly as well. Certainly most consumers don't anything beyond what is currently available (wired or wireless), but most consumers also don't know that they don't need it. What they do know is the advertising saying that their new notebook/phone/tablet supports the newest wireless standard and they are going to need a router that supports the same.
  • peevee - Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - link

    I suspect most users do not have a NAS, a few have USB3 hard drives attached to their routers (with speeds limited by hard drive itself), very few have USB3-connected SSDs in which case USB3 speed is plenty to saturate either SSD or WiFi link.
    But the thing is 2.5G Ethernet should not be any more expensive to mass-produce, so should appear everywhere just because of competitive advantage of higher number on a spec sheet over 1G.
    Widespread availability of multi-gig Internet at home at reasonable prices looks to be far away though. And advantages of it are marginal at best. Almost no home user can reasonably justify even 300Mbps over 100Mbps, let alone 2.5Gbps over 1Gbps even if it would be available.

    Now, large corporate offices should demand 2.5G on clients with 40G on servers everywhere. After all, employees' time is money.
  • Jedi2155 - Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - link

    I have 23-30 WiFi devices connected to my router, streaming 4K netflix video without issue. Only my personal PC is wired and even then the impact isn't not dramatic when I was using it on wireless.
  • lilkwarrior - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    The desktop market will always have high margins & great ROI from tech industry professionals & content producers alone

    With the price of proper quality computing. The average joe, student, and traditional professional invest in the highest quality laptop w/ perceived "desktop replacement" power they can afford & leave it at that.

    Similarly, people buy the most high-end phone they can afford to remove the need to buy a lot of similar equipment.
  • peevee - Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - link

    "The desktop market will always have high margins"

    The desktop market hasn't had high margins since 1985.
  • ikjadoon - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Cost: you have any numbers to back that up?

    Consumer computing: last I checked, lots of offices use PCs. Even thin clients use Ethernet...

    Lack of awareness: seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. How can consumers be aware of something that hasn't been ever sold to them?

    Growth of mobile technologies: ....yeah, it's sure a surprise the Ethernet port isn't EOL on PCs

    Wi-Fi is great and has completely changed mobility in technology. But Ethernet is a much more pervasive technology than you might be willing to admit.

    //

    "Intel being so low-key"? Mate, this is an Ethernet controller. What "high-key" event are you waiting for?
  • close - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Have you noticed we live in a world where you have manufacturers organizing special events just to tell everyone what else they slapped an LED on? "This old computer fan, now with LEDs! (put us in the news please)".
  • ABR - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    I'd actually like more speed than 1Gb and lower latencies for backups to my NAS, remote screens, etc., but this 2 and 5Gb stuff has never gotten me that excited to upgrade my switch, go rooting out remaining underspecced Cat5 cabling, and so on. Got to be at least a 10x gain to get rolling.
  • close - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Unfortunately the pricing is linear. A 10G switch is probably 10 times more expensive than an equivalent 1G switch.
  • azazel1024 - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Dang, you've got Cat5 around? 2.5GbE will run fine on 5E out to 100 meters and 5GbE is Cat6 to 100 meters. So long as it is true 4 twisted pair Cat5, it'll likely run 2.5GbE too, just over only short distances (I've tried 10GbE on Cat5e at less than 10 meters distance and it worked fine in an otherwise not noisy EMI environment and 10GbE is rated at 45m for 5e and 55m for Cat6).

    At any rate, I'd sure love 2.5GbE. I am running 1GbE right not for my home network. 2x1GbE between my server and switch and desktop and switch and with SMB Multichannel I can easily hit 235MB/sec transfers. That said, my RAID array has a bit more performance than that. Not by much, but a little more. A single 2.5GbE link should saturate my array. Switching the dual links over should give me tons of head room for years to come. Heck, even moving over to SSDs for bulk storage if that ever happens, a pair of 2.5GbE links is a lot nicer than dual 1GbE.

    2.5x faster...and even for things no requiring massive bandwidth, the latency is also 2.5x less. WiFi with 802.11ax is getting to the point that you need 2.5GbE to saturate wireless (at least at close range to the WAP). I've done some file transfer tests with 3:3 802.11ac 80MHz access points and wireless NICs and hit ~100MB/sec. That isn't quite 1GbE saturation, but it is pretty close. 802.11ax does deliver around 30% higher throughput. Which means even with 80MHz, 802.11ax to properly equipped clients is going to be limited by a 1GbE wired port.

    160MHz WAPs are going to be extremely constrained by wired port speed.

    Even 80MHz 802.11ax is much more likely to be with MU:MIMO on client and access point sides being part of the standard (and required this time, IIRC). MU:MIMO isn't magical, but it does make it a lot more likely and easy to leverage all of the bandwidth (minus one stream) that a WAP has, even when the clients are only 1:1 or 2:2.

    Anyway, in part I am saying even for wireless clients, 1GbE is going to start being a limiting factor on the backbone soon. Maybe not out to the internet, but within a network. Slowly it will trickle out to more and more people as being a limiting factor. I am sure the number of people who have >1Gbps internet access couldn't fill a stadium today, but it is slowly increasing.

    I won't do it right now in part because switch prices are so damn high and I don't have a use case where I NEED it, or it limits a lot of things. Probably my next router will have a 2.5GbE port if I were to guess (most higher end 802.11ax routers are coming with them now). Add on WAPs for my network I probably won't get until there is an option of one with a 2.5GbE port. My desktop and server and core switch I want 2.5GbE ports on them sooner rather than later, but I can wait. Almost everything else in my network can stay 1GbE.
  • dontlistentome - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    2.5Gb will likely easily saturate your NAS if it's spinning rust. The way we're going with QLC speeds on SSDs, you'd be able to saturate it with 100Mb soon :).
    I've played with 10Gb stuff and it uses tons of power = heat, cost, noise. Not good for home use. 2.5 is a good compromise and starts the step towards higher speeds as power consumption falls. If your NAS has PCIe, get a couple of cheap SFP+ cards off ebay (~$40/£35 each) and some fibre - £20 will get you a 20m cable and SFP uses a ton less power than copper. Mikrotik make a 4x10 SFP+ plus 1x 1Gb copper switch for not much over $100.
  • BuckmeisterG - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Is no one going to mention the pin out of that 8p8c RJ45 connector? Ignoring the subject of the article, the number 1 reason for poor network performance is poor quality or poorly installed cabling. And yes it does matter as much or more than the fancy device or switch you plug it in to.
  • close - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    Well you can get 1.5Gbps with a 2.5G connection over a bad cable. You're not going to get it with a 1Gbps link over a perfect cable.
  • azazel1024 - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    Other than a broken or improperly terminate cable, I've never seen a performance issue over a "bad cable". By broken I mean exactly that, one of the wires is actually broken. Improperly terminated I mean one or more of the wires is not contacting the terminal connector. That results in it falling back to fast Ethernet, which is possible over 2 pair, rather than 4 pair.

    Now, I've probably only installed a few hundred cables and tested a couple times that. I am sure something is always possible. I've never installed in a very high EMI environment and when I run cables I don't bundle dozens together.

    If I have quality NICs on both ends, I've never failed to get darn close to 1000Mbps after overhead is accounted for a 1GbE links.

    My reluctance to upgrade is the cost. I want and can leverage 2.5GbE on my network. But I don't want to spend $200-300 on a core switch that only has 8-10 total ports, with 2 of them being 2.5GbE. I'd want a switch that has a minimum of 6 ports capable of 2.5GbE and ideally it would have 8+ ports capable of 2.5GbE and have a minimum of 16 total ports (24 would be better) with the rest being 1GbE (all ports being 2.5GbE+ would be nice, sure).

    My cost limit is around $200-300 for such a beast. Then it is the NICs, I'd be okay starting out with only a single port NIC with a 2.5GbE port in my server and my desktop, but again, I wouldn't want to pay more than maybe $100 for each NIC. Call it $500 max to upgrade the basics of my network. Down the road add another NIC to each machine when they are cheaper or I need or want the extra bandwidth.

    But I don't need/feel like I need to replace my switch in a year or three if I end up with more than 2 ports requiring 2.5GbE. Or have some kludge where I need multiple switches networked together to handle my home network. I am fine running a cable to a little 5 port so that my AppleTV, Xbox and some other thing can all be on the network at my TV rather than running 2 or 3 or 4 cables over there. But I don't need my "core network" to have to have multiple switches to handle all of the drops and all of the devices on my network.

    We aren't there yet, but the last few months have been a lot of hopeful news. It does feel kind of on the cusp of having "affordable" 2.5GbE networking.
  • Kevin G - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    There are some good industrial RJ45 connectors. In fact, the ones I've been using are actually re-usable (both male and female RJ45). The downside is that each connector is several US dollars in bulk.

    But you are correct, a mismatched RJ45 connector and end can be a nightmare. I recall taking an hour on one termination as the CAT6A wire gauge was mismatched with the shielded connector.

    There is a replacement for RJ45 called GG45 which is aiming to be the connector for 25 GbaseT and 40 GbaseT interfaces. The unraveling of the twisted pairs to make a shielded connector causes problems at these data rates so the pins for two pairs move to the top of the connector. Interestedly, the GG45 profile is the same as RJ45 and pseudo backwards compatible as 100 Mbit speeds can be had with a GG45 cable in an RJ45 socket (or vice versa). This also opens up the possibility of yet another connector but this time being 12c12p with the same RJ45 profile but compatible with both GG45 and RJ45 cabling as well as its own. I wouldn't want to work with such a cable as that would have to be incredibly stiff and a super pain to terminate.
  • Givmedew - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    You are wrong. In the home environment almost all cabling is 10G capable. I've been installing Cat6 or better for 20 years. I've never encountered worse than 5e and 5e is rated at 45m for 10GBit/s.

    That's the rated distance on 5e but personally I've seen it fail 1GBit without replacing the terminations with shielded terminations.

    After terminating again I have not encountered very much that couldn't do 10Gbit. I would expect 2.5gbit to be rated at better distances since it will have better newer noise resistance technology as well as it being slower. The 10G standard is super old. Using some of the technology present in Wireless6 should surely allow pure crap copper that can't even get a 1Gbit connection to possibly do better.

    The problem is who wants this? I physically have met 4 people with higher than 1Gbit home networks. I'm including myself. My 2 best friends have nearly identical systems to myself since co developed and split research. I spent nearly 200HRs over 3yrs, my friend is in the business and designs these systems still had to invest over 100HRs of research on how to get a $40,000-100,000 5-10 year old system running for under $1000 per person not including any drives over 2TB and not including NVMe storage for virtual machines. I'm using 30 2TB drives and that is in my budget. All of those systems have bonded 10g or a single 40g on the storage and then up to 3 or 4 10g PCs in the house. I did new runs so I used fiber because it's rated at 100g and I could do 40g in the future.

    My friends house was wired in Cat6. None of those connections would run at 10g without terminating with shielded ends.

    His office we decided to just duck tape fiber to the end of the Cat6 and pull it on through. You can do that in a house.

    Another reason why I call bullshit for bad cables.

    Businesses can't upgrade from 1G to 10G without considerable investment if they are on Cat5e or Cat6.

    100m runs are nothing. You gotta re-run everything with Cat7.

    So it has nothing to do with the enterprise market either. With 10g being so outdated that I can pick up a 4 port 10g with 48 ports of 1g for under $100... Enterprise has already moved past 1g EXCEPT for offices.

    I say holding back had nothing to do with enterprise. But enterprise could be a new income source for 2.5g especially if it utilizes better noise rejection. If you can get companies with old copper to upgrade to 2.5g then maybe it makes sense.

    But realistically my money is on home internet being the real reason we have never seen an increase over 1g. I've been using 1g or better for well over a decade. But ONLY for moving video over Ethernet. Now that I finally have 500mbit internet well 1Gbit is the minimum home speed. My first dual gigabit motherboard was probably in 2004. Bonded (enterprise router) it could see 120MByte/s on 2 streams. That was the near max speed of a hard drive at the time. 2 drives in raid could do 200-300MByte. (Eventually bonded Ethernet could transfer single files at bonded speeds and nowadays you can fully utilize bonding across huge connections even for single file transfers)

    But no one else I knew utilized 1gigabit. My first really fast internet was Verizon FiOS in 2008 at maybe 50mbit if I remember. Since I left FiOS land my first internet that required a gigabit was in mid 2013. I got the call from Comcast that they upgraded my area to 125mbit and in real life Comcast would let you burst close to 200mbit.

    Now people needed gigabit. But wireless was already exceeding 300mbit in real use cases and 100mbit was no problem.

    2017 I move to an area that has gigabit speeds for under $100. Since they are running an older system that maxes out at 50mbit up I decide to buy 500mbit down 50 up since 1000/50 was $20 more.

    I don't see 2Gbit being available for at least 5 if not 10 years. It depends on Google and Comcast. I have WOWay (Wide Open West). It could come to market in 5 years for Greater Chicagoland if Google's sneaky plan to infiltrate Chicago works. But my money is on 10 years.

    So they have 5-10 years to get that tech into routers.

    Most people won't care!!!

    Real world Wireless 6 speeds on 2.4GHz exceed 1Gbit. 4.8GBit on 5GHz band. You'll want your main PC if they exist to be connected to Ethernet if you are a pro-sumer/enthusiast. Nobody else will care.

    Wireless 5 really does exceed 500mbit. I get 600mbit network test and 550mbit speed test on my 5GHz WoW provided router. Disabled in bridge mode I use Meraki Cloud Mesh and see around 100mbit on 2.4GHz with older Meraki units. I could double or triple that but am waiting for the license to expire and will install Wireless 6 APs.

    With wireless 6 we don't need anything better until home internet gets to 10Gbit. Even then... With individual users seeing 1 to 5gbit speeds I doubt end users will want faster. At these speeds we really are talking about the best NVMe SSD speeds over the internet.

    So who needs faster than 1Gbit?

    For now? Nobody. You can already do 2Gbit file single file transfers with bonding. Actually I have 1 computer that is quad bonded and it will do over 3gbit/s I see 350MByte file transfer speeds. It's not really fast enough for video editing. 10GBit is the minimum for 4k pro res at 756GByte per hour or 12 minutes per hour to transfer from the mixer to your work station. Right now not even video editing must have 10Gbit because for a lower invest you can put an NVMe drive into an enclosure and get 8-12Gbit write and 15-20Gbit read from a single external NVMe thunderbolt enclosure. You can get 20gbit write and 40gbit read on multi NVMe enclosures.

    They cost less than buying new 10G and 40G network equipment. So this is yet another hurdle in the pro-sumer, enthusiast, small business sector.

    When moving video in an office do I need to use a network? NO

    So again I go back to the Internet. Internet is going to drive connection speeds.

    To my knowledge you can NOT utilize bonding for IP without some serious hardware and anyways you can't bond connections on the routers you get from the internet company.

    When people can buy internet that is over 1gigabit Intel or someone else will ALREADY need a solution in place.

    Similar to 1g being in motherboards 10 years before it was needed. 2.5g needs to be in motherboards before anyone can use it. My guess is there will never be a large retail market for 2.5g by the time it hits shelves the router you rent will have 2.5g and absolutely no one is going to need more than the 4 ports typically included. Once 5g home internet comes along 5g Ethernet will need to be ready for routers. But 2.5 and or 5g Ethernet will need to be ready soon for motherboards.

    Lastly some 10g motherboards exist. If Intel makes 2.5g and 5g available they protect their 10g enterprise by killing low cost 10g consumer products dead in the water!

    My dual 10g dual 1g Mellanox card probably cost some business $1000. I paid $50 from a company selling 1000 used ones. They probably upgraded from bonded 10g (20g in certain scenarios) to 100g.

    Also creating 2.5g and 5g creates an important segment for Intel.

    If you go to eBay you can buy used server crap for nothing. I picked up 2 dual 40g Mellanox cards for $10/ea. I haven't used them but I can put them into my server and my main PC and direct connect them for up to 80Gbit of connection.

    Used 2.5g and 5g stuff doesn't exist.

    This is my analysis of this product and it comes from 20 plus years experience utilizing enterprise stuff at home. I had my first managed enterprise switch when I was 14 in 1997. It had 10mbit 100mbit auto-sensing could do bonding and importantly plugging in a friend who had 10mbit didn't knock everyone else down to 10mbit (common back then). I used it for LAN parties.
  • abufrejoval - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    The switch situation has markedly improved IMHO: I started with the ASUS XG-U2008, which was wonderfully quiet and smal, but only offers 2 10Gbase-T ports and no NBase-T support (2.5/5Gbit) and then added a Buffalo BS-MP2012 true NBase-T switch, which was certainly cheap enough at ~€50/port if a bit noise without hacking.

    For me noise is a crucial issue, because few 10Gbit switches are built for office or home acoustics. I have workstations running almost inaudible when pushing 800Watts out of the chassis while a 45Watt NBase-T switch can make a room impossible to work in.

    The hacking (low-noise constant flow Noctua fans) might have bit me on the Buffalo, because the other day one of the three switch-side Aquantia 417 might have gone bad: I lost four ports out of 12 so I went a-hunting for a replacement, which would perhaps be quiet without the hacking.

    I got a Netgear XS508M 8-port variant, and that turns out to be wonderfully quiet. Yes, it has a fan and perhaps things would get a little noisier once I were to connect lots of older Intel 10Gbase-T cards without energy efficient Ethernet support, but so far the fan is next to inaudible with 2-3 ports connected running iperf3 for a good 10 minutes or so.

    And those Netgears come a quite a few sizes (4,8,12,24 port) and pretty linear prices, somewhat comparable to what the NICs cost, too.

    I have been using Aquantia AQC107 10Gbit where I have the slots, RealTek 2.5Gbit USB3 for Gemini-Lake µ-Servers and notebooks and even the QNAP 5Gbit USB3 for a Xeon-D that unfortunately lacks the PHYs for the native 10Gbit ports and needs its PCIe x16 slot for a GPU.

    After being stuck with Gbit Ethernet for so many years, in this day and age of affordable SSD storage on home-servers, my blood pressure is no longer spiking on larger file copies and backups.
  • abufrejoval - Thursday, October 3, 2019 - link

    sigh, sorry for those typos, need edit...
  • yeeeeman - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    The announcement was pretty loud, heard it from 5000 miles away. Joking.
    Given the fact that 1Gbps is more than enough for 99% of consumers, I still see no point yet in moving to 2.5Gpbs silicon. It is more efficient to carry less data (i.e. compress/decompress data), than to up the speeds. I have been on a 300mbps connection for 10 years now. I have never ever felt I needed more than that. Sure, would be nice to finish an 100gb game download in 2 minutes, but while it downloads I can watch some youtube, no hurry.
  • dromoxen - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    This would suit me BUT I would need a new mobo for it..1Gb is nice but 2.5Gb would make a good difference, this between two PCs @ home (video in/out). Wireless does eem to be leading the pack in R+d, and is the way of the future , except for hacking/sniffing worrys
  • yetanotherhuman - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    I look forward to it. I find the Aquantia cards kind of unstable, but to be fair, I haven't upgraded them to the newest firmware yet.
  • Diogene7 - Friday, October 4, 2019 - link

    I have some questions :

    1. Would it be possible to re-architect 10GbE or more using USB-C port (ex: a future Thunderbolt 4.0 standard as Thunderbolt 3 already have a theoritical bandwith of 40Gbit/s) ?

    2. From there, as USB-C Thunderbolt 3 can theoritically deliver up to 100W power, would it be possible to develop switches PoE (Power over Ethernet) USB-C switches that deliver up to 100W power

    3. Finallly, would it be possible to integrate those 100W USB-C port instead of USB-A port that we sometimes find on some modern power socket ?

    The goal would be to unify an architecture that distribute up to 100W power by USB-C socket, while also being a network backbone for an entire house...
  • Azlehria - Saturday, October 5, 2019 - link

    The problems with USB as a network bus cable are manifold. First, USB cable, and plugs, are expensive. Second, it's effectively impossible to field-terminate. Third, although they're rated for more insertion/removal cycles than typical 8P8C connectors, USB jacks and plugs tend to be less resiliant when abused. Fourth, testing equipment is a niche product that's difficult to find. Fifth, any power circuit larger than a single 20 AWG pair is not compliant with the USB spec, which designs for a maximum cable length of 3 meters. Sixth, that pair is de facto guaranteed to be stranded, reducing its capacity over distance.

    Once you reach horizontal cabling lengths, fiber is cost-competitive with USB and *can* be terminated in the field. It's not, effectively, distance-limited. Testing and even certification equipment is readily available, even rentable. You can't run power over fiber, but PoE is often incompatible with existing TP plant due to the changes in conduit fill limits. Whereas you can replace TP with fiber and run mains power in the same conduit - fiber is non-conductive and non-heating, so most building codes allow it to be run in the same raceways as mains cable, unlike other communications cable.

    On the other hand, if your existing plant allows or if you're installing new plant, 4PPoE permits power delivery up to 100W already, although I'm not sure any products are on the market yet as 802.3bt was only finalized last year. Standard PoE+, which is widely implemented, allows up to 25.5W, and non-standard PoE implementors such as Cisco, Ubiquiti, et al. have long supported higher power limits up to at least 112W in some installations.
  • thorski - Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - link

    can someone "quietly explain" to me how the crappy wired plug on the first photo of the article would even work at 100Mbit, let alone 2.5Gbit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA/EIA-568

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